Wolfgang Petrick (1939, Berlin - Germany) lives and works between
Berlin and New York.
From 1975 to 2007 he has been professor at Hochschule der Künste and a
member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 1993. In 1976 he was
selected for Documenta 6, while in 1981 he’s been given the Deutscher
Kritikerpreis.

In 1964 Petrick was one of the co-founders of the legendary
exhibition group Großgörschen 35 and dedicated most of his works
to social-critical themes. In 1972 he joined the group Aspekt to
further the ideas of Kritischer Realismus. Since then the artist’s work,
which includes painting, sculpture and book design, has progressed from an
eccentric figuration with surrealistic leanings to a sophisticated compositional
style with super realistic elements affiliated with Critical Realism, to
an expressionistic figuration that echoes both Matthias Grünewald and Max
Beckmann. Petrick’s figures are artificial creatures consumed with
sadness and bitterness and it’s clear that the indecent ruins of their bodies
refer to the decay of society, a leitmotiv in Adolph von Menzel’s work
and quite an obsession for most of last century German painters such
Beckmann, George Grosz and Otto Dix.

All the work of Wolfgang Petrick orbits around the fundamental
theme of man, wounded offended, invaded by the factuality of the world,
excluded from the communication in which living beings share the nakedness
and frailty of their fallen state. The human figure doesn’t ever appear in its
ideal or regular proportions, but undergoes the tensions of the forces which
alter it. The image of the body is almost never whole, but ruined by signs of a
variety of terribile wounds. Another process which the figure undergoes is
that of metamorphosis, for which we find ourselves confronted by beings seen
as if through distorted mirrors or hybrid figures, mutants, hermaphrodites,
the most unlikely chimeras in which the aspect of the human being becomes
masked or more precisely combined with that of the animal, the falcon, the
wolf, the snake or the shark, representing a propulsive force. This
fundamental ambivalente is manifested also when Petrick stages
the transformation of man into an object, the grafting of the mechanical ad
the human, the organic and the technological, which takes to the use of
prosthesis and every kind of technological gadget.

In Petrick’s figures there is an element that enters in patent
dissonance with their convulsive dynamism and the twisting and the
alterations which deform their appearance: the gaze. In faces that are without
expressions, like masks, the gaze is immobile, without pathos, turned
towards an invisibile distance or seemingly turned inwards. In
Petrick the internal gaze doesn’t lead to some liberation, but rather
is a metaphor of the separation of the individual and the world.
Petrick’s beings have nothing austere and heroic about them, while
they are dismembered and beaten, they mantain a detached attitude, because
they are at the same time actors and spectators of history and of disaster.
With the growth of ranger so grows detachment and, althought we are
involved in extreme danger, the only thing that can save us is our capacity of
alienation.